John Fox Consulting - ImaginGO UX Design Case Study

PORTFOLIO

ImaginGO, 2024

Position: Chief Product Officer, Founder
Overview: ImaginGO creates digital Creative Thinking exercises for classrooms.
Problem being addressed: The decreasing scores in student's creativity test.
General responsibilities: Essentially, created and delivered everything...Project strategy and management, overall technical and creative concept, UX, content creation, computer programming, graphic design, animation, security (SSO), systems implementation and management
Project URL: Main URL, https://app.ImaginGO.com is protected. See it live here: https://demo.ImaginGO.com
More info: https://www.ImaginGO.com

ImaginGO started out as a question, "How to make people more creative and innovative?" I asked this to my sister in 2019. Her response was, "We have to change K-12 education." (this was a US-focused product, so this reference was for the American K-12 education system.) And so that is what we set out to do.

Over the next 2 years, I started to put together new designs and raw prototypes. I started to research K-12 education, teacher pain point and test these raw ideas with educators.

Eventually, I moved to an highly-functional MVP which became the product that we brought to market in 2023. The following is the evolution of the product. It started like many ideas, scribbles on a notepad (which I unfortunately no longer can find). These scribbles were made into a Powerpoint document showing the various creative exercises that were to be part of the v1.0 MVP.

We eventually put these ideas into a Miro board where we collaborated between our small team of my sister, 2 educational consultants and myself. I took these wireframes and simple instructions and began the design and programming of the exercises.

We decided to define our own ImaginGO language. The exercises were now called GOGOs. The original idea had 12 GOGOs but that was reduced to 6 for the MVP (there was only 1 person, me, doing all of this and there are only 24 hours in a day!). I love designing logos, so I made the decision to name and brand each GOGO, uniquely. I was inspired to do this by the Jack Box games. I also borrowed the idea of the floating intro screen (which we learned may be too much for a lot of teachers).

Because I wanted ImaginGO to have the look and feel of a video game, I designed it with vibrant colors, characters, sounds, music and animation. I decided to build the MVP using, mainly, Adobe Animate with it's ability to export to JavaScript. Some of the earlier designs were originally either hand-drawn or were created using Illustrator and then brought into Animate.

Below is "Brain Space". An exercise where a student has to fill in the empty space, visually, and then later write a story. This was the general evolution for the GOGOs from paper->Powerpoint/Miro->Adobe Animate:

Because I wanted ImaginGO to have the look and feel of a video game, I designed it with vibrant colors, characters and animation. I decided to build the MVP using, mainly, Adobe Animate with it's ability to export to JavaScript. Some of the earlier designs were originally either hand-drawn or were created using Illustrator and then brought into Animate.

Below is "Brain Space". An exercise where a student has to fill in the empty space, visually, and then later write a story. This was the general evolution for the GOGOs from
paper->Powerpoint/Miro
->Adobe Animate:

We built out the six GOGOs and packaged them into the overall ImaginGO platform. We had already tested with many teachers and received great feedback. What could go wrong? :) We wanted a strong "word of mouth" campaign but many teachers didn't understand what we were doing. I created a quick overview video:

This led to more classroom engagements and pilots. We developed relationships with distributors, as well.

On the UX and usability side, teachers had no problem with ImaginGO. Occasionally a feature request but nothing really serious. The problem we had became a business one. Schools and districts were not willing to pay. This was quite a conundrum.

We were able to raise money from an early Friends & Family seed round. With that funding, we were able to create a nice, professional video. This video captured more of the overall idea when it comes to Creative Thinking versus selling ImaginGO.

ImaginGO continues to this day. Business has been slow but the importance of fostering Creative Thinking is more important today than ever because of the introduction of AI/LLMs that people will depend on more and more for their thinking.

We are in the planning phases of pivoting towards the business market. We are currently investigating market fit for such a product in corporate training and innovation.

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